For those of you who think mandates are new phenomena, just over the last two years, I would argue that they’re much older than that. Yes, over the past two years they’ve been in our face, literally, with the covid mandates such as masks, distancing, injections, and all their other ugly cousins. But they began much, much earlier than that, just hop into the Delorean with me and we can go “back to the future!” I’m a car enthusiast, and just in that industry alone, mandates and regulations that had to be adopted by the manufacturers and the rest of us have changed the landscape over the past 50 years, from emissions to energy to safety. Now I’m not saying that each one of them was terrible but were they all necessary and how much did they drive up the prices? It doesn’t stop with that, this had permeated everywhere, just look at today’s appliances such as dishwashers and washing machines, in a quest to make them more efficient you have to use them twice to get the same results as the ones from a bygone era.

The paternal European Union recently pushed the appliance madness further by mandating that toasters must make the bread perfectly limp instead of toasty, does this mean that those of us who prefer toast the way it was meant to be are “toast!”

Just think about all the things government mandated, it mandated auto insurance, seat belts, motorcycle helmets, corn additives in gasoline (“ethanol”), safety features in cars as previously mentioned increasing prices dramatically, and mandatory devices to “clean up” your auto exhaust while also helping out by making your car run more inefficiently so you burn more fuel, creating more exhaust.

So how did we get here, to an overbearing “nanny knows best state?” Could it be that we’ve allowed our once free land to be taken over by a Frankenstein form of neo-fascism, wherein corporations bribe or convince local and federal governments to mandate consumers purchase or consume their products, making the corporations fabulously wealthy while slowly siphoning out our liberties through a myriad of mandatory pinpricks, leaving you to bleed out but not enough to kill you, after all they need “the goose!”

Of course, before I can convince you to join the fight against the Empire, I’ll have to prove to you that the problem existing pre-Covid. Of course once “you’ve seen the light” then we’ll unpack why this problem should be sky high on our list of priorities to deal with, spoiler alert, it’s because so many of our other problems can be traced directly back to this one

One of the common misconceptions of those that live in the West is that “nobody tells me what to do I buy what I want when I want”, not so my friends, we’ve been letting the government mandate many of our purchase decisions for decades now. Sadly, we’ve been asleep at the wheel and allowed it to happen. Now to our defense, they were cleaver and did so ramping regulations up incrementally. They were far too smart to turn up the heat to high and “boil the frog” altogether. Every overreach was always framed as being intended for our benefit, to protect us, to keep us safe, to “reduce our risk.” Bubble wrapped, safe, secure and risk-free, not like our dumb ancestors who proceeded us prior to the 1970’s and who failed to comprehend the benefits of surrendering autonomy just to make sure they were “snug as a bug in a rug!”

The good news is that covid proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that mandates are getting completely out of control and unless we intervene only going to ramp up to infinity and beyond. Don’t believe me, no problem, exhibit number 1 ladies and gentlemen, in their quest to save the environment and by extension the planet, California has relegated gas cars to the garbage heap of history, they’re on borrowed time and mandated to be obsolete by “the government experts!”

So, the first principle is: we participated in our own destruction by conceding that it is government’s job to urgently address all kinds of risk that comes long.

Even if we never gave permission explicitly for them to rule our lives vis-a-vie mandate fiat, we at a minimum have IMPLICITLY conceded it. Of course, we might have whined about it, but that was the extent of our collective objections, we never even drew the line in the sand. I’m a firm believer that before we can fix what’s wrong, we must acknowledge our hand in it.
And now, one off tiny concessions have birthed a herd of mandates! In fact, they’ve become so widespread that we’re just encountering them coming and going, and escape seems to be impossible!

Tomorrow we’ll look at the 2nd point